Numeracy – Page 4 – St Ninian's Primary School

Ship ahoy in P1R

IDL has been really interesting this week as another message in a bottle arrived, Ephraim did a great job of finding it and sharing it with the class. Our task this week was to think about pirate ships and make our very own ship to allow us to join in with Captain Pete Pigeon’s adventures. First, we looked at examples of pirate ships, some big, some small, some fast and some colourful. We also learned about the different features of a ship, ask us to name some of them for you. This led to us building a ship in our classroom for us to play in, we’re almost finished it! In order to join the adventures we also linked our learning to literacy and completed some application forms, we had to choose what job we would like – helmsman, cook, quartermaster, captain, etc. No-one wanted to be the surgeon as we learned that they had the horrible job of cutting pirate’s legs or arms off!!

We love Fridays as we get to share our pirate homework tasks, some examples this week were: Dawid made a treasure chest, Isla made a treasure map, Lucy made a pirate ship, James made a pirate passport and Abigail brought in pirate cakes for the whole class (they looked and tasted great.)

Wednesday was a special day as we celebrated ‘Burns Day’. We had a traditional Burns Supper which began with an ode to an haggis, it was tricky to understand some of the words as they were in Scots language. This is something we would like to look at again and learn some traditional Scots words. Everyone wore a piece of tartan and then we raised a glass(of irn-bru) to toast the haggis. It was great to see everyone having a wee taste of some of the Scottish food – haggis, neeps, tatties, oatcakes and shortbread. Check your child’s online journal for a wee video!

Subtraction continues to be our focus in numeracy and this week we have been learning about words that mean the same as subtraction, ask us to tell you all about it. Our favourite activity was subtraction smash, all you need is 10 balls of play dough and a dice to play. Try it at home, it’s great fun and can get a bit messy! We also used our hopscotch mat to practise jumping back as that’s what we need to do when we subtract – Start at the biggest number and then jump back. Some of us are now realising that using cubes is also a good way of doing subtraction sums, it makes the sums easier to work out.

In phonics we have been working on ai and oa, these are sounds from our Vowel House story. We have sorted pictures, played smartboard spelling games, circled the ai words and made snails for our phonics display. Next week is a revision week so there will be no new sounds in the red jotter. Our reading is improving every week, we are all trying hard to sound out words and use our knowledge of Fry’s words, it’s really important to practise these as much as you can. Check your homework folders on Monday to see if you have any new ones to learn.

We finished the week by going to the P4/5 assembly, they taught us more about World Religions which linked nicely to what we had been doing in class last week for World Religion Day-thank you P4/5. We also completed a task to put in the time capsule we are making to celebrate our 40th Anniversary which is next week, we are all looking forward to the celebrations!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all our friends and family! It’s been a busy start to the year and P1R got straight back to business this week with lots of learning.

The focus of the week was Vision and Values.We spent time looking at our school vision statement and values in the classroom and what it meant to us. We discussed that we should try to be like Jesus when we are at school and here are some of the children’s thoughts:

We should work hard-Dexter

Be kind-Brooke

Make friends and play together-Amber

Pray together-Ephraim

Share with one another-Klaudia

Have good manners-Lucy

Respect everyone in our school-Dexter

We then decided to look at our class charter and refresh this for the New Year, we chose a pirate theme.

In literacy we had some revision of all the sounds we know and spent time wordbuilding. Next week we will move onto ee and oo.

In maths we finished off our addition topic by learning the number bonds for 10. We watched a news flash to help us and also watched a video about rainbow facts which helped us remember the linking number facts for 10. We also had another go at missing number facts using the number line to help us.

IDL was exciting as we found a message in a bottle, a pirate hat and a pirate eye patch. The letter was from Pirate Pete Pigeon asking us to join him on the Squeaky Sail for some pirate adventures. We’re really excited about this. We used our talking book and visible plan to think of ideas for our adventures. Over the coming weeks we are hoping to transform our classroom and area with some pirate props.

All about numbers in P1R

This week our school took part in a numeracy review and our learners were able to showcase what they have been learning in numeracy. James and Lucy were selected to meet some special visitors and talk about their learning-well done to both of them for speaking so confidently!! On Wednesday Miss Smyth and Mr McDowall, the Depute Headteacher from St Margaret’s visited our classroom and joined in with our number talks lesson and a numeracy carousel. They were really impressed at how well the children could talk about their number work and enjoyed using play dough, the ten frames and the iPads. Everyone was keen to share what they had learned about addition and number stories.

The children were all excited this week when we began learning about Advent. We all went over to our class altar and set up our purple colours and the manger were baby Jesus lay. We all learned that Advent is a time of waiting and preparing. On Thursday we also began opening our Advent calendar to help us count down the days to Christmas.

Looking after ourselves is really important to us and we managed to get outside to do our daily mile. Everyone is managing to run more and walk less! In PE we are getting really skilled at dancing and impressed Mr McCurdy in the Grand Ole Duke of York dance. We are also looking after our teeth and brushing them during the school day.

In literacy we learned our last sound for this term, z. Everyone made their very own z zebra and thought of different words with z in them. Bingo was one of the favourite activities of the week. Our focus for the rest of term will be blending all of the sounds we have learned and spelling. We have been continuing to work on our Frys words and our word wall is looking very busy. Some of us are now using these words in our writing and are looking for them in our reading books.

Primary 2/3 Weekly News

It has been another busy week in Primary 2/3! Mrs Keegan and Mrs Howley are really proud of the children and all of their hard work.

The children would like to let you know about some of their highlights:

Maya liked learning the colours in Spanish and using them to play a game.

Levente, Annayah and Zuzanna liked learning about gravity when we investigate how a helter skelter works in our Funfair topic.

James has enjoyed joining letters in handwriting.

Oma loved learning about 3D shapes in maths.

Andrew and Rachel loved exploring money in our Funfair topic and deciding which coins to use for different rides.

Carly liked writing an imaginative story about a visit to the Funfair. We thought about sights, sounds and smells and everyone produced fantastic writing!

Maeve liked when our surprise visitor, ‘Terence’ popped in to our class on Thursday to help us with our writing.

Aaron liked learning about Advent and painting an advent wreath.

Matthew loved talking about maths to our visitors during our numeracy review on Wednesday.

Alishba has loved rehearsing for the Nativity play and thinks that our Primary 2s are doing a great job!

Calvin has enjoyed skip counting in 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s during our maths lessons.

Chloe really enjoyed yoga because she thinks that it helps her learn better.

Have a lovely weekend.

From Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and Primary 2/3

Primary 2/3 News

Thank you to everyone who came along to Parents’ Night. It was lovely to have so many positive conversations about the children’s learning.

It has been another really productive week in Primary 2/3.

The class has set an ambitious dojo challenge! Ask your child what is going to happen when we reach 2000 points. Everyone is very excited and working together to reach our target.

We have been working hard to tell the time to o’clock and half past (Primary 2) and quarter to and quarter past (Primary 3). There are some great activities to consolidate these skills at Doorway Online .

In Spanish we have been trying hard to count up to 20 – there are some tricky numbers! We really liked playing the Magician game to help us learn the numbers. If you’d like to try it at home click here .

This week we tried our hand at playing Hoopla as part of our Funfair topic then we produced some fabulous instructions in our Big Writing lesson, explaining how to play Hoopla.

We also investigated how dodgems work. We found out about forces then did an investigation in groups and wrote up science reports. Everyone loved making the dodgems crash into each other!

In Numeracy we’ve been developing our addition skills to 20 (Primary 2) and to 100 (Primary 3). We’ve all used Sumdog to consolidate our learning, with lots of expert help from our Sumdog experts in Primary 6.

In Health and Well-being we thought about our November theme of ‘Achieving’ and told each other how we achieve both inside and outside school and our friends reported back to the class. What a talented class we have!

Have a great weekend!

Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and Primary 2/3

Fantastic P2/3

It has been another busy week in Primary 2/3 with lots and lots of fantastic learning.

We have reached the last chapter of The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark and we have loved listening to the adventures of Plop, the little barn owl. Ask your child what their favourite part of the book was and let us know in the comments.

We celebrated All Saints’ Day with a lovely whole school mass. It was great to have so many parents joining us for this special feast day.

In Spanish we have been counting to 20 and having great fun challenging ourselves to learn the trickier numbers.

In maths we have continued our work on telling the time. In numeracy P2 have been adding doubles and near doubles and P3 have been adding teen numbers.

We are so excited that our new topic is The Funfair! We had a busy and creative planning session on Thursday when we worked in groups to plan our topic. Our first challenge was to create a price list for a Fairground food stall – you can see our creative price lists in our Learning Journals.

Everyone has been busy setting their targets in literacy, numeracy and health and well-being. Our targets are all in our online learning journals – please log in and have a look.

In writing we thought about firework safety and created rules to keep everyone safe at the weekend. Look out for our stories appearing on our Learning Journals.

The highlight of our week was the multi-sports festival at James Young High School. We tried badminton, rugby, basketball, football and a mini assault course and we loved all of the activities. It was great to try so many new skills!

Have a great weekend.

Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and P2/3

Fun and friendship

I can’t believe how quickly the weeks are flying by, not long to go now!

In our literacy this week we have continued to learn about ar/or/ir/er words. Everyone is getting really good at identifying which pattern they hear in the words even though they sound very similar. We enjoyed playing the Aar Pirate game with a partner and competed against one another to get four in a row. We also wrote sentences in our jotters keeping our writing neat in preparation for P2, used the magnetic letters to make words and played some games on the smartboard.

In maths we have been skip counting in 2’s and learning about odd and even numbers, we did this through songs, games, written tasks and practical tasks. We also had a visitor to the class, Mrs Gallagher, from the WL Numeracy team who did some fun counting on activities with us using counters, numicon and dot patterns, she was really impressed at how well the children were doing in their maths work!

In our PE lessons we got the chance to go outside and use the running tracks. We did the 200m and 400m races, everyone raced in heats before we then had a boys and girls final. It was lovely to see the children supporting and encouraging one another to the finish line. The 3 winners in each final will now earn points for their houses – well done!

In IDL and HWB we focused on friendship and everyone pointed out that this is one of our school values. We learned about friendly/unfriendly behaviour and we all agreed that we preferred the good friend traits. We were all given a challenge to try and make at least one new friend in school or at home and each day the children excitedly told us about their new friends – well done everyone! In our writing we wrote friendship recipes using lots of WOW words – “a sprinkle of happiness”, “100 grams of love”, ” a pinch of fun” and ” 3 cups of kindness”. We also worked with our friends in P1D to make friendship bracelets out in the school garden, this was tricky but good fun! To finish off our friendship week we decided to have Goldentime with P1D at the park, everyone played together nicely showing what good friends they all were, what a lovely way to end the week!

P2M Weekly News

Another exciting and busy week in P2M.

Have you heard all about the game we played in PE this week? It was called dice dash. This game incorporates a range of skills from social interactions to speed and stamina. Ask your child about this game.

We are continuing with our number topic of multiplication and everyone is working really hard with this topic… Miss Meechan is really impressed! Our learning this week focused on ‘switcher’ sums. Sophie ‘switched’ the sum ‘2 x 4 – 2 groups of 4’ around because we can’t count in 4’s. She switched this sum to ‘4 x 2 – 4 groups of 2 because we can count in 2’s’. Great work, Sophie.

We have also been learning about ‘arrays’ to help us with multiplication. Last week we learned about arrays and this week we consolidated that knowledge through a range of activities. One of our activities was a competitive game with a trio or partner. In this picture you can see Robbie, Ethan and Imogen using the array flashcards to create and practise ‘times’ sums. Well done!

We are continuing to practise counting in steps of to help us with our multiplication knowledge of skip counting to count quickly in groups. We really enjoy playing the ‘pass the ball game’ to help us count in steps of. Did you enjoy the homework task this week? I loved reading your comments on the blog about what numbers you counted to… great work! We listened to and sang along with a new ‘counting in 2’s’ song this week. Have a listen and sing along at home too.

We finished off our maths topic of money this week. We completed a money assessment to show off how much we had learned over this 5 week topic. As well as completing this assessment we played 2 games to showcase the skills we have learned. One of these games was an ‘Orchard Toys’ board game called ‘Pop to the Shops’. Do you have this game at home? This is a fantastic game which requires children to recognise coins, count coins, pay for things with the exact amount and give change too. If you have this game at home I would love to see some photographs of you playing. You could post them in the comments section or bring them to school. As well as playing a board game we played a game on the ipads using an app called ‘Moca GPB’. Why don’t you download this app on a device at home and have a go. Let me know how you get on playing this game.

I’m sure you have heard all about our topic of ‘Transport’. All children have shown such enthusiasm with this topic and have loved learning about a range of different modes of transport from old to new. This week we watched a video of the first moon landing. Here is the video we watched:

After watching this video we wanted to make our own rockets. We had to work with a partner to create a design, develop that design into a model and think of a name for our rocket. We then took our rockets outside and launched them using our very own rocket launcher… we even remembered to do the countdown just like we watched in the video. Check out the school facebook page for some of our rocket launching videos.

Lots of the children have been interested in cars as part of our topic. We know that the roads around our school can be very busy with lots of cars… vans and lorries too. Therefore, it was important that we learned about road safety. We crossed a road outside of our school gates and remembered the important points when crossing… don’t stand too close to the kerb, look and listen for vehicles before you cross and when it is safe to cross the road remember to keep looking and listening for cars.

We had a look at the main road outside the school and spotted some ‘islands’ in the middle of the road. We know that these can help us cross one part of the road at a time. But do you know we don’t even need to use these islands? Some of us knew about the underpasses around Dedridge. These go underneath the roads which make getting to the other side of a road even safer. We also learned about ‘crossing patrol – lollipop man or lady’ and we learned how these people could help us when crossing a road. Sophie was playing a spelling game on the iPads and found this picture of a lollipop man and managed to spell the word ‘stop’. This game is called ‘spelling bug’ if you want to download this at home.

When we got back to the classroom we created posters with all of our knowledge about road safety and we even received a certificate to show that we know how to safely cross a road.

Our posters were so good that we decided we would like to share our learning with some other children in the school. We showed the nursery, P1D and even P4 our posters and gave them some tips and advice about road safety.

What a busy week. I look forward to seeing you all again on Monday for more exciting learning experiences.